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Gnostic Hearts:

The Restless Dead

By: Dan Whitmore

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Disc I: Abyssia

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Track I: Silurian Blues

A soul slept at the bottom of the sea

And dreamt of a distant surface.

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The world was chronicled in by a sudden, fervent pierce into the realm of consciousness: an unforgiving schism from the beautiful, deep sleep. Shock rang through his system, bursting up and down axon highways. His eyes shot open, but they had not been crusted shut; it was as if he had only been rendered unconscious for a mere instant.

How long had he lain dormant? He did not know, but he could guess. The aeromoss and gut flora had overgrown and burst from its filters, where it brushed against his upper lip with every slight twitch of his face.

As the initial jolt subsided, all that remained in its wake was a raw, collective calm. All of his faculties were accounted for. He knew who he was, what he was, and he knew why he was here. Such cruel purpose glowed brightly in this lightless abyss.

The man analyzed his surroundings. He was immobile, but not paralyzed. He could flex his appendages, he could shift about and feel the smooth interior of his suit, but that itself was snagged upon the unknown. His eyes travelled upwards and he could see a small, red light that pulsed arhythmically, an indicator that some power remained, however little it may be.

An electrical torch ignited: a beacon to beat back the gluttonous dark. The man looked to his side and saw that things like coral had wrapped around the limbs of his suit, although the strange lifeforms were not rigid. They bent and writhed in the unseen currents. He tried to pull away from their taut and vinish grasps, but his suit was difficult to move in by default. It inhibited his abilities and even something like dense plant growth could stop his joints that had not yet warmed up.

The man was glad that his neck had not been bound, for even the smallest freedom here could be considered a monumental reward. He glanced warily around him, at this harsh environment. No, harsh wasn’t the word to use; it was all manners of calm, remorselessly placid, and in that regard it was terrifying beyond belief. Life was pale here, almost entirely colorless, for there was no sun to fuel such lavish properties. Particles floated about, scraps of distant feasts that rained down from above and collected upon the seafloor. An occasional, slow-moving fish would float by without so much as a single movement: a drifter in a desert of decaying flesh. The man felt as if he himself were nothing more than another corpse to be picked clean.

An alarm quietly called out through a monophonous speaker, “Hostile lifeform detected.” The man pinged his sonar, which to his surprise was still in functioning order. An electronic overlay appeared on his helmet with the bathymetry readings. Something massive lurked overhead and it was steadily drawing closer. It wasn’t following the current.

Whatever it was was organic and alive.

The man dimmed his lights, but the red blip on his sonar kept approaching, its speed constant and unfluctuating. He struggled to free himself from his biological shackles. His muscles strained under immense tension, but the coral held him still with an iron and steadfast grip, like cultists restraining their offering upon the altar. It was a feeling of wretched exposure, an insurmountable power difference. It disgusted him.

A notice appeared on his HUD: the oxygen levels in the surrounding waters were plummeting rapidly. He shut off his sonar, for he did not need it. He could feel an insidious presence directly in front of him, one that felt as if it would engulf his very being. Minutes passed, but it did not move. It hovered right in front of his face, agonizingly.

It had found him, it had recognized what he was… there was no denying that even if one were to succumb to utter insanity. He recognized the situation and decided to demonstrate one last act of defiance. He had been there before. The lights blasted on at maximum luminosity.

The creature’s exocones were focused sharply upon him, as if completely unaffected by the sudden deluge of a portable sun. Its limbs were crowned in hostile, grisly spikes, like a set of jaws outside of its own body, yet at its ends it retained almost human fingers. The man was in awe at the sheer size of it: a sea scorpion larger than a submarine, a leviathan consecrated in crimson, chitinous plates. His hearing drowned in cheliceral chatter, but through the cacophony, he saw a startling thought.

It’s… sapient… but it’s not what I’m looking for.

He had been prepped on hundreds of languages, knowledge that had been instantaneously and artificially anchored deep into his neural flesh, but he could not place a label on these solfeggio tones. The external microphone on his suit crackled to life. “What language is this?” he asked the thing, as absurd as it seemed. “I know its meaning, but I do not recognize its sounds.”

“It is the language all life can understand,” it communicated through its warbled voice. The thing shifted its head to the side as it studied him inquisitively, with movements that shook the tangled overgrowth like wind through uncut hair, like papillae, as if the world was growing used to the taste of a stranger. “Who are you, small one, and how did you end up here?”

“The circumstances for my arrival are classified,” he said with an almost robotic repetition.

“Humor me,” it requested.

“I’m no jester,” the man assured as he tried to tug his limbs free again. “Free me, or I’ll boil you alive and eat you for lunch,” he fibbed with calculated bravado.

“I find that hard to believe.” If gills could sigh, it had most certainly done so. “Then can you tell me why you are here? Nobody ever yearns to come, but they do nonetheless.”

The man stared at it from behind his tinted helmet and wondered if the sea-beast could see his eyes. “Business,” he curtly replied.

“They always say that. It is always business and business alone.” The thing raised a vicious-looking appendage and pointed it at him. “I will free you if you tell me that there is something more to you than that.”

After a pocket of silence, the man dropped a verbal depth charge, one he said with dogged conviction. “I’m here to kill a man.”

“You’re a murderer, then? A murderer who receives his pay in coin and his joys in blood?”

Coins. An ancient word.

The man glared at him with scorn in his eyes, “There’s a special title for people like me: post-hominid eradicator.” He moved his fingers subconsciously in frenzied anticipation, “Someone has called in a noyade on a specific individual.”

“Is it me?” the thing asked.

“No,” he replied bluntly.

“Ah, good.” It spoke with an unexpected and uncanny coldness, “I don’t believe in violence.”

His movements ceased. “And what about you?” he asked, “What’s your story?”

“I was trying to make my way to the surface, but it appears I have gone the wrong way. How dreadful… here I am at the very bottom of the world, although even such a wretched place isn’t as vile as I thought it’d be.”

“The surface? What do you seek there?”

“There is… purpose there, one that is beyond the scope of killers.”

There was a silence between them, one so great that every particle of detritus that rained from above seemed deafening in comparison. The man eventually broke the stalemate, “My name is Hakkatan.”

“An odd name,” it noted. “There are those that call me Siddhartha.”

“That’s great,” the man said. “How about freeing me now?”

“No, I don’t think I will.”

“Why not?” he protested.

“If I release you, I will only be increasing the amount of violence in the world. What an unscrupulous act that would be.”

Hakkatan pondered his options. “What if I told you that the man I am going to kill is the source of all violence in the world, that his death is the world’s only path towards peace.”

“You’re not the first person to place that cross on one man’s shoulders,” Siddhartha said as it twisted and writhed around in the darkened waters. Its immense body disappeared into nothingness as the man’s eyes followed it towards its tail. “But, perhaps it would be frugal to free you… perhaps you could help me in my goals.” Every speck of its latticed eyes seemed to focus in on him with fierce analysis. “I see within you. I see a pale, faint fire… virtue. Let us pray that it is not extinguished.”

With a single swipe of its claw, the sea-scorpion freed him from his constraints, although it was done with unintentional overcompensation. The entire bed of vinelike growths was uprooted by the blow, as was a severe portion of the seafloor, and Hakkatan found himself careening off into the unknown, head-over-heel, with such centripetal nausea that his vision began to black out. He was quick to act: lengthy, bonelike rods extended from his suit’s fingertips, which then connected to each other through sheets of bio-canvas to form some type of pectoral flipper. With a burst of powerful movements, he stabilized himself. He stared around cautiously and as he looked at his gyroscope readings, he could not make out which way was up or down. With a final wayward glance, he saw the looming insectoid swimming up from below: a harrowing sight, one that predated upon mankind’s survival instincts and its most innate fears. Regardless, he kept his calm.

“Are you alright?” Siddhartha asked lunglessly.

“Everything seems fine,” he replied. “The suit and the environment limit my movement. Honestly, I feel as if I could swim more efficiently without it, but I do not know how I would fare against the pressure.” Hakkatan flexed his chest again, which jettisoned him towards the creature. “My extremities feel as if they are swimming through treacle, but I am alive.”

“I too, would like to shed my skin.”

“I wonder if the nerve endings have degraded with time,” the man said, still examining his own exterior.

“Nerve endings? What insidious technology is this?”

“It’s a semi-synthetic organism: a human at one point, if one could call it that. I’m piloting it.” He noticed the change in its demeanor, even through its utterly inhuman edifice. “It doesn’t feel a thing and it remembers nothing anymore. It was made this way through honest practices… to pay back a debt. Think nothing of it.” He increased the power to his headlamp and then to his sonar, but did not see the results he was looking for. “Is there a city nearby?”

“There is when one leaves the waters. I think it is called Carchem… although I am not certain. I only heard its name in passing.”

“Then I should head towards it then,” he announced as he began to paddle away from where the leviathan had come from. “Thank you for the… charity. May our paths cross again.”

Siddhartha looked up at the man and spoke before he faded into the inky veil. “You cannot reach it that way. We cannot swim straight upwards or we will hit a rocky ceiling adorned in vicious stalactites. We’re in a series of colossal, underwater caverns.”

Hakkatan spun around as his headlamp still beamed lustrously. “Then how does one escape this sea?”

“The caverns are connected and if you follow the proper channels, you can reach Carchem. It is no trifling matter however; we are talking about extreme, nautical distances. It is the kind of journey humans were never meant to undertake.”

The man stared quietly off into the unknown, his sonar pinging at maximum virility. Even such bleeding-edge gear had its limits. “I am not keen on dependency,” he stated emotionlessly.

The thing’s mandibles flicked effortlessly through the water, as if tasting the current for a twinge of fate. “I am heading that way as well. You are not dependent, we just happen to be walking the same path at the moment.” It began to swim ahead of him, almost dragging him along in its tumultuous wake. “It is the only path out,” it stated.

Hakkatan followed the leviathan at a reasonable pace, one that wouldn’t exhaust him over such an unfathomable haul. He knew he needed to conserve his strength. “You can see all the way to where the tunnels are?” he asked skeptically.

“I can,” it claimed.

“You seem awfully adapted to the depths for someone who claims to have never been to them before.”

“I adapt to all environments. I feed where I please.” Siddhartha turned and glanced at him with a cluster of hexagonal lenses. “You seem suspiciously calm around something you surely perceive as horrific and grotesque.”

“I’ve seen worse,” he stated.

“Then perhaps you are a far more voracious beast than I am.”

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The stalactites loomed overhead with vorpal edges, like a thousand swords of Damocles, with maws that have been starved for millions of years. They looked at him with hunger, a primal yearning in those eyes that one perceives within the folds of their rocky exteriors. He dared not touch them. He dared not approach.

“We have reached the deepest entrance to the tunnel systems,” Siddhartha said with his head turned slightly towards the diver that swam warily at his side.

Hakkatan could see the massive opening, which was almost as wide as the scope of his vision. From its mouth spewed a constant stream of long-dead bodily materials: a font of unmourned rot to gather in the fathoms below. He could not recognize the creatures that occupied this zone, neither dead nor alive, but he could approximate. The only mobile life were crablike scavengers picking clean the carcasses that passed by them, beings that were larger than men, but by no means colossal. Unlike his suit, they were heavily armored to withstand the intense pressures here. It was a biological coping mechanism.

“Swim quickly and they will not bother you,” Siddhartha assured. “They are terrified of me, so if you keep a close proximity, all will be fine.”

He could hear the cracking of shelled joints echo through the water. “I have my own ways of dealing with things.” These crustaceans lacked eyes, but surely their other senses were heightened; he would adapt to them accordingly. Hakkatan tethered himself to the sea-scorpion’s exterior and shut down his suit’s electrical systems before forcibly slowing its beating heart to a stop. He would make as little of a disturbance as possible.

Mere moments later, the suit violently flexed forward, to the brink where it almost forced the pilot’s ribs to pierce through his own skin. He fought against it, but its grotesque, oversized musculature had seized up as if suddenly crystallized by the frigid depths. He felt the suit’s jaw unhinge and from behind the helm he could see the banded tip of something slowly crawl out of its throat before it jettisoned off into the distance, leaving nothing but a trail of froth in its wake.

An overstimulating flash of light: an explosion whose true, brutal nature was exacerbated by the water’s density. A plethora of limbs and chunks of armor ripped chaotically through the collapsing currents. Instead of aggravating the uncanny decapods, the tremors and cavitations sent them fleeing for their lives. He watched as they leapt down from their perches until they eventually faded into the depths. The tunnel’s access point was now vacant, say for the perpetual sludge it espoused.

The heart beat once more and he could hear the dim crackling of electricity as it passed through ancient and unkempt wires.

“How violent…” Siddhartha groaned. “Perhaps I have made a grievous mistake.”

“It was a misfire,” Hakkatan said as he sat there, suspended motionlessly within the suit. “The warhead must have been primed this entire time and I accidentally triggered a release,” he stated as he slowly moved his arms. The suit responded in-turn. All seemed normal.

“Were they sentient, I would have felt worse about it,” the sea-beast grunted.

The two of them entered the cylindrical channel, whose ribbed walls surrounded them claustrophobically like greying esophageal tissue. The bulk flow of trash and viscera greatened with every stroke, to the point where it quickly became difficult for the man to move against it. Neon, triangular warnings popped up erratically on his HUD. High toxicity environment. Non-fissile. He watched as an externally-mounted rack began to mechanically shift into place, where a threatening needle pierced into the neck flesh of the suit and injected a general-purpose panadote. Pssht! The warnings temporarily subsided. The prospect always put him on-edge; he worried that one day the needle would end up reaching him by accident. “It feels like a sewage pipe,” he said aloud in an attempt to distract himself with conversation.

“You’ve been in one?” the scorpion asked.

“A few times,” the man said as he toggled on his bathymetry systems in an attempt to map out the tunnel’s course. “Can’t say I enjoy it. It’s not exactly the type of wetwork I had in mind.”

Siddhartha shuddered responsively, “Your detection systems will not suffice here.”

“It’s always good to have a second pair of eyes,” he retorted. The thing could detect his sonar without a doubt. He made a mental note of it.

“Allow me,” the scorpion insisted. The thing emitted a deep and resonant scream, the kind that cannot be heard, only felt. Bubbles formed as if the two of them were stuck in a boiling cauldron and at such a close proximity, the rending soundwaves felt as if they would splinter the man’s bones and liquify his organs. It was pain on a primal scale.

Hakkatan was reeling, his breath erratic. It was a strange feeling, a type of fear to which not even he had been accustomed.

“Apologies,” Siddhartha said with a tenor to his voice. “It is a small price to pay. The road ahead is elucidated, our path is clear.”

“Was that not the infliction of violence upon another being?” he asked with venom.

It looked at him coldly, “That isn’t even scratching the surface.”

The two of them crept forward. Hakkatan swam with his stomach to the wall, pressed up as tightly as he could to glean the utmost distance between him and the dense, gushing bile. Over and over, they shifted from one winding corridor to the next. How many miles had they travelled? His odometer had long-since relapsed: his progress was now a transient, unknown mystery. Faith in a stranger, belief in a beast… a sickening feeling, to be unreliant on one’s own flesh.

Something bleak and quiet caught his eye, something that bitterly and lonesomely resisted the foul cascade. The man swam over to it wordlessly. The toxicity levels spiked rapidly, but he could afford a few minutes.

“A piece of junk and nothing more,” the scorpion muttered.

From here, the man could faintly make out the remnants of a vessel adorned in shattered bulkheads. Whatever it was had been gored open and cleaned out over the years, a fact personified by its pitted and near-vacant interior. Hakkatan adjusted his bionic eyes, the ones embedded within his own head and peered subdermally through the veneer of rust and grime. Carchem Benthic Probe… a sunken, steel cairn for witless explorers. “There were people down here?” he asked.

“You are down here, is it such an impossibility? We are closer to the surface, after all.” It kept its head facing forward and beckoned to the man, “Come, we are almost free of this place.”

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